2024 Conference Abstract Highlights
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October 28, 2024 (Monday) Day 1
MORNING SESSION (1): Challenges and Opportunities to Meet the Energy Trilemma: Impacts, Implications, and Insights
- A Global Regional Comparison and Opportunity Assessment of Trilemma Competitiveness. (Keynote Speaker: Robert Snell of The Quaker Group, Inc.)
The transition readiness assessment is based on expert opinion, and anecdotal evidence from post-pandemic recovery efforts and regional evaluations of the management of trade-offs; and subsequent strategic response in a post-pandemic environment. Relative trilemma competitiveness (both current and momentous) provides some insight as to the projected relative value of opportunity crudes and degrees of freedom levers. This presentation will define an energy transition framework that addresses the management of trade-offs among the trilemma elements of sustainability, equity, and energy security. OPEC Secretary-General Haitham Al-Ghais put it succinctly calling it the ‘energy quadrilemma” that includes practicality and realism among the other 3 elements. The presentation will evaluate the current extent to which each global region--North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Middle East & Africa--has evolved currently along the trilemma dimensions under the backdrop of realism.
- Breaking down the Energy Transition (Austin Lin of Wood Mackenzie)
Everyone is talking about the energy transition and what it means for both businesses and consumers. At times it can be hard to make meaning out of all the commentary, with such a broad topic proving ripe for differing opinions and outlooks. This presentation focuses on the key changes that will define energy markets over the next 30 years, at both a national and global level. It is through the lens of Wood Mackenzie's current forecast but will also highlight the areas where there are gaps between policy objectives and social/economic realities.
- TMX and Beyond: Addressing the Energy Trilemma with Canadian Heavy Crude (Dinara Millington of 17Insight)
This presentation explores the energy trilemma question by examining the impact of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX) on Canadian heavy crude supply. It delves into how TMX changed supply security by providing a reliable alternative to geopolitically constrained sources and improving the price competitiveness of Western Canada Select (WCS) in global markets. But at the same time, constraining supply to markets, which historically sourced Canadian crudes. The presentation also addresses affordability, highlighting TMX's role in opening economic routes for Canadian crude to Asian markets, and discusses the sustainability aspects, focusing on Canada's net-zero emissions policies and technological innovation. This analysis positions Canadian heavy crude within the evolving landscape of global energy dynamics and market trends.
- Optimizing Refineries for the Energy Trilemma: Advanced Technologies (Gregory Shahnovsky of Modcon Systems)
The global crude oil market is undergoing significant changes, influenced by geopolitical events, regulatory decisions, and shifts in supply patterns. The global oil supply is anticipated to reach new heights in 2025, propelled by unprecedented outputs from the United States, Brazil, Guyana, and Canada, which are set to dominate the supply growth against the backdrop of a sluggish demand increase forecasted globally. In this context, optimizing crude oil blending and processing has become increasingly complex and critical for maintaining refinery efficiency and profitability. This presentation introduces an innovative approach that integrates advanced photonics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to address these challenges. It also discusses the implementation of Modcon online crude quality analyzers and AI-enabled optimization software designed to enhance the blending and processing of crude oil.
AFTERNOON SESSION (2): Ensuring Reliable Crude Supply and Blends Compatibility
- Heavy Crude Oil Supply and Pricing (Ed Scardaville of Baker & O'Brien)
US refineries, in general, and the US Gulf Coast oil refineries, in particular, have evolved to take advantage of the heavy crude oil produced in the Americas, such that today, the regional heavy crude oil supply and price discounts are essential components to US refining economics. This presentation summarizes the current regional heavy crude oil supply flows and oil refining demand and reviews recent and future investments shaping the future heavy crude landscape. It also discusses the introduction of the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline, which will increase heavy crude oil supply to the Canadian West Coast from 2024, and explains its implications for heavy crude oil trade. Similarly, the impacts of recent and future regional oil refinery investments, such as Mexico's new Dos Bocas refinery, on regional trade flows will be assessed. The presentation rounds off with the combination of the pipeline, production, and oil refinery investment implications for heavy crude oil supply, trade, and discounts to 2030.
- Current Quality of Brazilian Crudes (Alexandre de Oliveira Gomes of Petrobras)
In 2008, in the Brazilian southeast, pre-salt commercial crude oil production started. This new frontier was a great opportunity to incorporate large volumes of higher-quality oil with those that were being produced until that moment in Brazil. These new fields have 13 years of commercial production and now correspond to a substantial part of Brazil's crude oil production. Despite the productivity of pre-salt, traditional fields have undergone a revitalization project, with modern production units to better produce the mature reservoirs of the Campos Basin. New wells, including from the pre-salt layer, will enhance this production. These facts show that Petrobras has a huge knowledge of deepwater oil production, looking at methane and CO2 emission reduction. This presentation compares the quality of some pre-salt crudes and their cuts with the medium Brazilian crude, calculated with the values corresponding to all Brazilian production in 2021. The comparison clearly shows the quality difference between the crudes from pre-salt crudes and the ones from other Brazilian basins.
- Crude and Bio-Oil Compatibility (Scott Sayles of Becht)
Processing crudes from different sources leaves the possibility of blending incompatible mixtures. The ability of a refinery to operate using a dumbbell-shaped crude distribution provides the potential to optimize low-cost crude blends while meeting the refinery product slate. Understanding the potential for compatibility effects without physically testing the crude provides the ability to choose the crude mix and purchase it while the market factors are favorable. The fast response times also extend to opportunity crudes or distressed cargo. This presentation discusses the basis of the correlations and their application to actual blends. Becht's compatibility model uses different correlations to provide estimates of the potential for different blends to create incompatible mixtures.
- Thermodynamic Approach to Evaluate Compatibility of Crude Oil Blends (Asok Kumar Tharanivasan of KBC, a Yokogawa Company)
Blends of incompatible crude oils or refinery intermediate streams may drop out asphaltenes and would lead to expensive repairs and downtime. Consequently, there is a considerable need for a predictive tool to assess the compatibility of compositionally different oils processed within the refinery. Such a tool has been developed and incorporated into KBC's Petro-SIM process simulator. This presentation focuses on sharing the methodology used for modeling the asphaltene precipitation in crude oil blends, validation of the tool using various datasets from the refiners, and the compatibility assessment criteria related to asphaltene stability for the oil blends.
- Feedstock Stability and Blend Simulation Using NIR Device and Digital Application (David Crochet and Alex Park of Nalco Water/Ecolab)
Refineries have increasingly focused on processing unfamiliar crude oils to enhance profitability. However, the introduction of these new crude slates introduces uncertainties that can impact refinery operations. One significant challenge arises from crude incompatibility due to asphaltene instability, which affects desalters, emulsion stability, and preheat trains. For decades, the industry has recognized the importance of tracking asphaltene stability. Suppliers and refineries employ diverse equipment to assess feed stability, including benchtop microscopy and titration equipment. Unfortunately, these methods often require time-consuming, offsite laboratory testing. This presentation delves into development: the utilization of a portable, handheld near-infrared (NIR) device. This device allows the assessment of crude oil tanks and other refinery feeds for stability and blending suitability with near-instantaneous results. The presentation highlights real-world case studies where they have been successfully applied.
- Managing Operational Calm in the Face of Crude Supply Unrest (Rob Gutierrez of Veolia)
The global crude oil supply today looks very different than it has historically. These changes can be attributed to supply constraints, technological developments, economic opportunities, and a multitude of other factors. As the future of energy remains uncertain, the crude oil refining feedstock supply will continue to evolve rapidly due to geopolitical changes and volatility of the overall global crude trade. Crude oil refiners continue to deal with the variability of crude/feed quality, crude compatibility, and its impact on processing that creates operational unrest. This presentation discusses a comprehensive predictive solution, CrudePLUS*, that helps manage operational unrest and provides the industry with a method for quickly and accurately predicting crude oil compatibility and processing challenges. These predictions provide crude buyers, unit operations engineers, and other concerned users with advance notice of potential crude processing problems, which can then be handled through inventory management, chemical treatment program adjustments, and field process optimization.
October 29, 2024 (Tuesday) Day 2
MORNING SESSION (3): Quality of Cost-Effective Grades and Processing Optimization
- A Unique Approach to Advanced Crude Management Using AI through Topology and NIR Analysis (Didier Lambert of Topnir Systems)
Crude characterization is critical for refinery optimization. Real-time knowledge of crude properties is the only way to ensure that full value is extracted from the crude, based on simulated plant operations and product quality. A good understanding of the crude has an impact on the planning and affects all refinery operations. Thus, benefits from Big Data analytics shall be captured if high-frequency trustworthy data are available, providing sufficient process observability. This is true of flows, levels, pressures, and temperatures that can be reconciled if there is some instrumentation redundancy, but it also applies to quality determinations of hydrocarbon streams from crude receipts to product liftings. Today, crude quality is changing more and more rapidly. In the past, up to recently, oil wells were characterized by a crude assay that would change only slowly over time, allowing stable feedstock qualities. Now, the availability of shale oil and other opportunity crudes is a cause for wider feedstock variability. This presentation shows Topnir Systems’ unique technology that addresses this challenge flawlessly. An AI and predictive maintenance approach using topology with spectral identification, linked with an NIR model, can identify and characterize any crude mixture, allowing the prediction of the full property vector of any crude oil.
- BPCL BPMARRK®-Aspen Hysys® Integrated Digital Twin Model to Optimize Operational Performance and Achieve Sustainability in Feedstock Flexibility (Pranab Kumar Rakshit of Bharat Petroleum)
Despite several breakthroughs in refinery digitalization, the lack of real-time refining characteristics predictor prevented the best utilization of digital solutions. Variations in feedstock oil quality as well as a lack of reliable crude assay information make the task of real-time optimization extremely challenging if not impossible. BPCL’s patented technology, BPMARRK® generates entire assay about 500 data information as refining characteristics within minutes as compared to several weeks through conventional laboratory methods, thus, making it extremely useful for real-time applications. This presentation discusses BPCL BPMARRK® - Aspen Hysys® integrated digital twin model that provides an instant solution to the feedstock transient losses and bridges the gap between the scheduled plan vs. actual. The discussion will include how the BPMARRK® - Hysys® integrated digital twin model is ideally placed to fill these gaps and provides end-to-end solutions to facilitate crucial business decisions related to crude selection, planning, scheduling, capacity utilization, and refinery-wide optimization for profit maximization.
- Crude Processing Reliability (Bob Falkiner and Sam Lordo of Becht)
Due to the increasing availability, economic attractiveness, and easing of export restrictions, many refiners are processing larger volumes of conventional and unconventional crudes produced from fracking operations. These crudes often contain polymers and other additives that upstream processors are utilizing to enhance oil recovery or address hydraulic limitations in their operations. This presentation provides an overview of some of these polymers and additives that are often present in produced crudes, where these additives appear in the refining process, and the impact that these additives have on the unit operations. Methods to identify, mitigate, or eliminate the negative impact that these polymers or additives have on unit operations or product specifications will be reviewed and discussed using several case studies.
- Optimizing Carbon Footprint when Processing Crude Contaminated with Filterable Solids (Nigel Hilton of Dorf Ketal)
Filterable solids contamination is a variable that must be managed for processing opportunity crudes. This contaminant is typically secondary to other characteristics of the crude assay and there is often a high degree of variability in filterable solids contamination even when the crude diet is kept constant. This contaminant is important as the carbon footprint of the crude column furnace is directly correlated with the level of filterable solids in the desalted crude. The higher the level of filterable solids, the greater the likelihood of pre-heat fouling which increases the heat load and carbon footprint of the furnace. This presentation presents a new option for managing this problem that is superior to traditional methods (solids wetting agents, antifoulants, and equipment cleaning) at a fraction of their cost. We will also review the mechanisms of filterable solids fouling and the inherent limitation of traditional methods to mitigate the cost of fouling. The new option is the addition of a low-cost additive to the desalter that breaks the cycle of solids accumulation to improve filterable solids removal. Several case histories are presented to compare the cost performance of the new option with traditional methods.
- Crude Oil Corrosivity Prediction (Saadedine Tebbal of SET Laboratories, Inc.)
Crude purchase is the main expense of a refinery and processing discounted opportunity crudes has a positive financial impact. However, crude corrosivity continues to be a critical issue in refining due to the processing of opportunity crudes, especially with world high acid crude production expected to increase. When economics dictate the addition of opportunity crudes to the feedstock processed, rapid analytical tests and corrosion prediction tools have to be used. This presentation reviews the current predictive tools used by operators and their shortcomings in evaluating the corrosivity of the processed slate. Total Acid Number (TAN) is not a good measure of the concentration of acids in the crude and the total sulfur content does not readily correlate with corrosion. Analytical tools such as H2S evolution and naphthenic acid concentration versus temperature and their easy implementation in the corrosion predictive tools are presented herein.
AFTERNOON SESSION (4): Low-carbon-intensity Oils, Alternative Feedstocks, and Petrochemicals Production
- Carbon Intensity Modelling (Randy Segato of Haverly Systems)
The diversity and market access of crude oil movements continue to grow across the globe. Whether it's the complexity of Canadian Heavy Blends via the newly operating Trans Mountain pipeline now competing with South American/Middle Eastern heavies, expanding US Light Domestic Sweet movements into Europe competing with Brent/African sweets, or shifting Middle East/Russian crude pathways, Refineries continue to assess economic crude change opportunities through advanced planning tools such as GRTMPS. In addition, the industry must now also assess the Carbon Intensity (CI) impacts of these crude pathway changes. This presentation introduces a new Carbon Intensity GHG model within H/COMET, enhancing refinery planning with detailed Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) capabilities. This includes accurate refinery product carbon Intensity allocations for near-term case studies or strategic energy transition-based opportunity crude optimization. Furthermore, the presentation covers the state of some current industry measures along with some of their existing shortfalls, and bridges into how the new Haverly development will enable quicker, more robust management modeling of Scope 1,2,3 Carbon Intensities for varying Crude Pathways.
- Crude CI as a Decarbonization Lever for Refineries (Paul Cannizzo of HSB Solomon Associates LLC)
As the refining industry is expanding its focus around carbon reduction, an important element is rising through the optionality matrix. Energy efficiency, electrification, flare reduction, low carbon fuels, and carbon capture - these are all viable solutions that can help solve a worldwide problem. But have you considered the carbon footprint impacts that Crude Selection may entail? Crude feedstock selection can play an integral role in a refinery’s carbon footprint. Crude Carbon Intensity (CI) is a key variable to be incorporated when one is making strategic decisions towards carbon reduction goals. This presentation demonstrates there is a wide band of crude carbon intensities across a Gate-to-Gate analysis and shows how understanding the optionality across the various blends can assist in reducing your carbon risk and in making better strategic decisions for your facility and corporation.
- Industrial Experience with Topsoe's Renewable Fuels Technology and Key Benefits (Henrik Rasmussen of Topsoe)
This presentation discusses the current production of renewable fuels and expected growth in North America including the number of plants at various stages from engineering, and construction to operation. We will detail the Topsoe HydroFlex technology and proprietary catalysts with an emphasis on what makes Topsoe the most successful licensor in this space. We will present the industrial yields of fuels that can be obtained from fats, oil, and grease.
- Detailed Characterization of FCC Products from Co-processing Biocrudes with Petroleum (Yi Zhang of CanmetENERGY)
Co-processing bio-crude with petroleum feedstocks through a fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) route has the potential to reduce the carbon footprints of finished fuel products while meeting government regulatory requirements on renewable content in transportation fuels. Moreover, co-processing can leverage existing refining infrastructure to save significant capital costs that would be required for building stand-alone biorefineries. This presentation discusses the insights gleaned from our recent research work that investigated the specific FCC performances of a mixture of hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) bio-crude in VGO, revealed results of cracking experiments using a commercial equilibrium catalyst, explored some cracking phenomena resulting from the use of the bio-crude blend with an elevated level of oxygen content, and analyzed the composition of FCC gasoline products and biogenic carbon content distribution.
- Pyrolysis Oil from Plastic Waste and Hydrogenation of Captured CO2 to E-methanol (Charalampos Panagopoulos of Hellenic Petroleum)
Tackling climate change requires the establishment of a holistic approach, where the selected sustainable solutions for the different sectors have the potential to lead the world to a favorable environmental equilibrium if adopted on a large scale and for years to come. Two processes are expected to have strategic importance on the road to net zero. The first one addresses the proper handling of a particular waste stream that is currently in abundance and that usually ends up in landfills, while producing a potentially useful oil – pyrolysis oil. The second one involves the direct hydrogenation of CO2 to e-methanol, a very important petrochemical molecule, the large-scale production of which currently consumes significant amounts of coal/natural gas and releases CO2 into the atmosphere. The presentation starts with descriptions of the processes to produce low-carbon oil from the pyrolysis of plastic waste and e-methanol from direct hydrogenation of captured CO2. It concludes with a short analysis of the potential uses of the products from these two processes, highlighting their prospective roles on certain decarbonization pathways and thus illustrating the reasons why they are considered a great chapter on the way to a successful energy transition.
